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Getting to Bushara Island Camp from Edmonton, Albert a is a bit of a production-it feels like you are going so far east you just might end up west. First stop is Calgary. Then London, Rome, Addis Ababa, Nairobi, until landing in Entebbe, Uganda where you begin the 8-hour truck drive over rambunctious pot-holed roads. We finally board an outboard motor boat for the last segment of our journey.

We cruise on Lake Bunyonyi (Lake of the Little Birds) past various islands and lake people in their dugout canoes. The islands are mostly terraced right to the top; it looks gorgeous but it means that every bit of land is being farmed. We pass Bwama Island, home of a former leper colony that now houses primary and secondary schools and an agroforestry project. We also pass by Akampene (Punishment Island) where unwed pregnant women used to be exiled. We go past some Crested Cranes, the national bird of Uganda, performing their mating dance on the lakeshore with their funny punk-rock hairdos. On spotting visitors, children from a faraway island scream: "Hey Muzungu! how are uuuuuuu?"

After roughly ten minutes on water, we can see our home-to-be for the next week. It has graceful super-model Eucalyptus trees fronting the west shore. The slender trees have been peeled naked by clans of Cormorants. Pif and Paf, the resident Pied Kingfisher birds, are waiting to greet us at the dock.

I am here to meet Canadians Tim and Joanne Specht and their Ugandan colleagues and to experience their Bushara Island Camp. The first of its kind, the camp is a stopover to and from gorilla tours. It's a bird watcher's haven, a private place for retreats and most importantly a community project. The Spechts are missionaries and development workers from a Canadian organization called the African Community Technical Service (ACTS). ACTS together with the Lake Bunyonyi Development Company (LBDC) offer an organic approach to sustainable development. An eco-touristic, fair travel camp, Bushara is a pioneer in Uganda.

Local Conditions

The beautiful environment of Lake Bunyonyi is not sufficient to feed the Bunyonyi community beyond the point of subsistence farming. Soil degradation, over-farming, a growing population and the decreasing size of land holdings are all factors. The poverty of the area's people motivated the Lake Bunyonyi Development Project. The one major resource that the area did have to offer was beauty and so the well-treed island was turned into an income-generating campground, which would support an agroforestry project to examine higher yielding farming techniques.

The Lake Bunyonyi Development Company started the camp with no tents, just camping grounds. They developed the camp slowly over the years; only building as they could afford it. In the beginning, the staff were not earning a salary, just one meal a day. Now the camp has eight tents, a group campsite and one cottage for rent and the company has 40 paid employees.

Uganda was once known as the pearl of Africa but during Amin and Obote's regimes, the country's economy plummeted and human rights violations soared to horrifying levels. Agriculture is the most important sector of the Ugandan economy, employing between 80 and 90 percent of the work force. Women are responsible for up to 80 percent of the agricultural production, which involves both subsistence and cash crops. There are currently almost one million orphans under the age of 15 who have lost their mother or both parents to AIDS. Uganda's GNP per capita is $170 - the seventh lowest in the world.

Amenities and Animals

The island has no electricity, running water, or flush toilets. The camp has solar panels, revolutionary dry latrines, a whole lot of candlelight and kerosene light, and a mandate to be good to the land and people. With its equatorial climate, Bushara Island is truly ideal. There are no snakes - just one kind of harmless oversized worm. No hippos, no crocodiles. There are no leeches or flesh-eating lake viruses. No Bilharzia (beaver fever). No mango flies laying eggs on your clothes only to hatch later from a sac under your skin. The only wild animals are genets (harmless cats), birds and a couple of frolicking otters. This is an island for serious chilling out. I couldn't help but declare almost hourly, "It's a birder's paradise!"

Our new home is called the Robin-Chat Tent. On a private patch of island we have a large green canvas safari tent. With its own patio, outdoor shower, flower garden and lake view, our new home is gorgeous - it feels and sounds like Eden. Nature here is very noisy. Bou bous, Robin-chats, Weavers, Finches and spiders busily weaving webs make a whole lot of noise on this little 1.8 hectare island.

My first activity of the day was to run the Eucalyptus trail twice round as the staff canoed to work and parked their dugout canoes in the reeds. I'd catch the first set of the day's bird music. Later in the day you can take a bird watching tour of the island with Enosh, who will give you a checklist of the hundreds of birds you might see or hear. You can also take a canoe tour to one of the nearby islands, visit a primary school, see some traditional dancers, or just canoe for the thrill of the paddle.

Meals are available at a restaurant at the top of the island or you can have lunch delivered in a picnic basket. For entertainment there is always the view from the Robin-Chat tent with Catfish jumping, otters frolicking and Kingfishers diving. Swimming laps around the island in the volcanic lake is always a good challenge. On Mondays and Fridays a flotilla of canoes can be seen moving toward the local market. Any evening of your stay you can do a starry nighttime tour of the lake by canoe.

At the camp you also have the opportunity to support the local economy by shopping. Clothing and homemade baskets come from a cooperative of women who sew on foot treadle machines. They have been chosen for the cooperative due to their inability to fulfill their traditional roles within their families-roles which always include heavy physical labour. Each of these women has a health problem or disability making them "burdens" to their families and sometimes causing them to be "unmarriageable." The cooperative trains the women in book-keeping and marketing as well, so they are fully able to run their cooperative independently.

Management Considerations

Currently there are 40 people working for the LBDC. The general manager, William Tibamwenda, has been with the company since the beginning when he started as a latrine digger and a night watchman. He explains that back in 1992 the top of the island was all bush, so they cleared it in order to build the restaurant there. To this day they use pangas to cut the grass. Pangas are large knives like machetes. There are no mowers available not even non-electric ones. When I asked Tim why they couldn't fundraise to get a push mower, he explained that having a crew of 10 men do it with pangas gives each man a job for a couple of weeks, push mowers would give only two men work for two days. This reflects their organic approach to development-if you introduce machines prematurely you can eliminate jobs, or you can create a non-sustainable situation where people become dependent on foreign machines, foreign parts and contributions.

"The partnership between Ugandans and Canadians is benefitting the local people," William tells me. "Before there was no development, no money, no education, no jobs, no agroforestry-just soil erosion. This campground is the mother of all campgrounds in the Kabale district. Others have copied us. Now there are six others in this area. The island was just used for cultivation before. The Canadian missionaries saw how poor the people were and wanted to create some revenue. We have never failed to pay the wages or taxes, and we have never failed to buy what we need. Tim is a good economist," William explains proudly.

Tim and Joanne Specht, the Canadian directors, try to ensure, with the training they do and with anything they add to the Island, that the Ugandans will be able to carry on. They train the staff in hospitality, guest services, marketing research as well as in business and product development. They have trained the kitchen staff and the sewing cooperative. They have had the staff trained in birdwatching. Along with William, they oversee the agroforestry project, an orphancare program, a micro-loan program, a sewing cooperative, and other community projects which are funded with revenue from the camp.